Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Blogger's Template

I found that the (not-so-)new non-standard drag-and-droppable Blogger template is not as unfriendly as I thought. The only really unfriendly thing it does is drop most of the stuff in your sidebar when you upgrade, but not because it is a straightjacket format with incomprehensible code. Just to be mean and force you to think about cleaning up as a default setting, I guess. Everything is pretty straightforward, even the code. They just added the drag-and-droppable layer for ease-of-use and that complicated the underlying code a little, but they let you get in to tweak it.

Right now I want to do something about the font(s). I have a thing about ones, lower-case els, and upper-case Is being distinguishable. They should not all look the same, in fact, they should look different as if the reader were Mr OCR himself. The badly-designed grapheme sets reminds me of a typewriter that my grandmother had where the l also functioned as the 1. (111Ill lIl1s this is a test)

Update: I thought it was going to be Courier, but it looks like I should stick to Georgia or Verdana with the occasional resort to Trebuchet for the purposes of distinguishing I, l, & 1 as in the admittedly highly hypothetical and unlikely case of publishing and interview with a musician called 1Ill1 of a band called the KimJongIl1s. Those are just the fonts Blogger lets you choose now, but I assume it should be possible to change it to Lucida Sans Typewriter – a champion at this particular task despite some strangeness – by editing the html directly. Later. I'd like to meet Lucida-san and thank her personally for designing it right, maybe find out where I can buy her typewriter.

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